The English local elections last week were disastrous for the Labour and Conservative Parties, both of which lost the vast majority of seats they were defending. The Reform party of Nigel Farage made big gains, electing more councillors on the day than Labour and the Tories put together.
This was not a pan-British vote: it involved a selection of councils in England, with Scotland and Wales not taking part at all. But it clearly represented a major advance for Reform, which has frequently been ahead of the two main parties in national opinion polls since the start of the year.
To set the seal on Farage’s victory, his party won a Westminster seat at Labour’s expense in a parliamentary by-election by a margin of six votes, having been almost 35 percent behind Labour in the same constituency during last year’s general election. Farage will now be hoping that he can reach a vital tipping point in his long-term rivalry with the Conservatives.
In a country with a proportional election system, two right-wing parties taking more than 20 percent of the vote each would be in an excellent position to form a government. Under the British first-past-the-post model, on the other hand, they might cancel each other out and end up with much fewer seats than their combined vote share would lead one to expect.
Farage has traditionally been the one who suffered from the pressure to cast a “useful vote” on the Right. After last week’s result, he will be aiming to deal with the Tories from a position of strength if they come looking for an election pact.
In his…
Auteur: Daniel Finn
